Vikrant Pujari

🚨Thierry Henry on Portugal’s elimination from the FIFA World Cup: 🗣️ “I’m going to say something that a lot of Portuguese supporters probably don’t want to hear. This Portugal team has massively underperformed. Not because they lacked talent, but because too many of their biggest players never reached the level everyone expected. Bruno Fernandes has been dreadful by his own standards throughout this World Cup. The creativity, the leadership, the decisive moments we’ve seen for years simply weren’t there. Then you look at Vitinha and João Neves—fresh from winning the Champions League with PSG. Two midfielders who dominated Europe. Yet in this tournament, they’ve been almost invisible. Missing in action when Portugal needed control, composure and personality. And then there is Cristiano Ronaldo. People will blame him because that’s the easy thing to do. I won’t. Because if you decide to start Cristiano, then you have to build situations that suit him. Instead, Portugal kept circulating possession without purpose. They had one of the greatest penalty-box finishers football has ever seen, yet they hardly gave him the service he lives on. That’s not on Ronaldo. That’s on the team around him. Spain deserve enormous credit. They played with a clear identity from the first minute until the last. Every player knew his role. Every movement had purpose. Portugal, on the other hand, looked like eleven talented footballers trying to solve the game individually rather than collectively. That’s why Spain are still in this World Cup. And that’s why Portugal are going home. Not because they had worse players… But because they never played like a better team.”